Friday, April 9, 2010

Song Conversion Service Update

The most requested feature for OnSong has been to convert your existing library of worship music into OnSong. It seems you all have text, HTML, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and PDF documents that you want to put into OnSong. The question for all of you is "when". The question for me is "how"!

The way I want to accomplish this is pretty simple. You would visit a web site on the computer that contains all the files. Then you would upload a ZIP file of your documents to convert. The OnSong server wold then extract the files, convert them to text, translate them into the OnSong format and email you a link. You would thence able to tap that link on your iPad to automatically import them into your library. Makes sense right?

Many of you have sent me sample chord sheets. The trouble is, they are all various formats. I think I can convert most to text. Detecting chords is not a problem, but the text conversion tool does not respect spacing in those documents which means the chords end up as just a line of chords.

Another issue I have found is that PDF files printed from SongSelect tend to not contain any text. They are more like a picture of the chords! This means that the OnSong service would have to offer an OCR translation of the page. I think I have a solution for that, but again, the issue is more that the chords are not positioned correctly.

I think one option is to do my best for the server to interpret the song content, and then provide an easy-to-use interface for quickly altering those songs on the desktop computer. Then, once you have saved your changes, let you email the link to yourself.

Version 1.1 will have the ability to import songs for this service, but the actual service will take some work. Please be patient!

1 comment:

Great thanks! I wish I could be of some help to you, this is an awesome program. Many thanks to you for creating AND maintaining it. OnSong should get commission from Apple because thats why I bought my IPad